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Have you ever met an educator that beams their "Why"?

By Anonymous

Recently I listened to a "Start with Why" podcast entitled It's Not About the Coffee! Finding Clarity of Why.  In this episode the two host talk to Lori Collins about her experience of getting to the "Why" of her business of coffee roasting.  When she gets down to her real passion and why she does what she does in this statement,

"I really want to serve through love, that people feel wanted, cared about, and loved"

you know her "why".  I wanted to go and stay at her hostel (which I don't think exists) and drink coffee all day.
Have you ever met someone that just oozes out their why or passion that you want to drop everything that you are doing and join them and their cause?  Earlier this year I had an opportunity to attend the Innovate Conference at the Graded school here in São Paulo.  At the conference I attended a session called "blue sky schools" lead by Dan Kerr (I happen to have worked at the same school as Dan prior to him arriving there, although I had never met him before).  The session was, for me at least, quite inspiring to say the least.  We discussed or better dreamed about the schools that we would all love to see exist.  Now it's all good and fine to dream, but what I found truly inspiring were the school leaders that had been invited by Dan to dare to dream as well.  What I found was that they were not satisfied with just letting dreams be dreams, but wanted to dive deeper into the steps that we are going to take to get there.
When I heard on the podcast this way that Lori describes her "why" I immediately thought of Madeleine Maceda Heide.  Madeleine the director of Academia Cotopaxi, was one of the three leaders who had been invited to share.  When Madeleine spoke about her school and her vision of where she would love to see it go, her passion was palpable.  She listened intently to all of us, clearly valuing our ideas, and then incorporated some of what we had said into her own view.  After the session had finished I stopped to talk with Dan and Madeleine, who is the director of Dan's school, stayed behind as well.  I had told Dan that I had been accepted into the Endicott program for administration but was leaning more towards doing a masters through MSU in educational technology.  Honestly, I don't remember what Madeleine said specifically, but the care with how she said it, to someone she had just met, gave me all the motivation I needed.  As we can see I chose to attend the masters in administration because I know I can be the inspiring, inspired educator that she is.
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